2025 / 30 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere

Franz Grillparzer’s Das goldene Vließ (The Golden Fleece, 1821) may be interpreted as a meditation on the structures and implications of love. Composed during a period marked by profound historical upheavals that reshaped cultural and ideological paradigms, the trilogy engages with the emergent bourgeois conception of “romantic love”—that is, the affective bond between a man and a woman culminating in a love-based marriage and the establishment of an independent household. This ideological framework simultaneously presupposed and reinforced sharply differentiated social roles for men and women. Within this context, the figures of Jason and Medea appear to interrogate, and ultimately destabilize, the very premises of this bourgeois ideal

The essay examines Robert Menasse’s literary and theoretical exploration of the European project through his major works Der europäische Landbote, Die Hauptstadt, and Die Erweiterung. Menasse conceives Europe as a “post-national utopia” founded on the moral legacy of Auschwitz and the Enlightenment ideals of solidarity and peace. In Die Hauptstadt, the European Commission becomes both stage and metaphor for the contradictions of a union torn between bureaucratic pragmatism and ethical purpose. By linking Brussels and Auschwitz, Menasse exposes Europe’s amnesia toward its founding principle – “Never again” – and its transformation from a peace project into an economic mechanism. Der europäische Landbote reinterprets Büchner’s revolutionary pamphlet to call for a renewed European democracy beyond national frameworks, while Die Erweiterung tests these ideals within the realpolitik of EU enlargement and the instrumentalization of historical memory. Through irony, polyphony, and intertextual dialogue, Menasse constructs a moral and literary space where Europe’s failures and hopes are confronted. His vision, as the article shows, remains both critical and utopian: a defense of a Europe capable of remembering its past while imagining a future of shared responsibility and transnational justice.

In Germany Shakespeare’s Hamlet became a socio-cultural catalyst that decisively contributed to shaping the nation’s identity. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, “Hamletology” relied on idealising constructs that progressively alienated the “spirit” (Geist) of Hamlet, that is its textual authority, from the “body” (Leib) of performance. In the 1960s and 1970s the productions by Adolf Dresen and Benno Besson in East Germany and by Peter Zadek and George Tabori in West Germany challenged the long-standing German tradition of sacralising the Shakespearean text. Taking Robert Weimann’s distinction between locus and platea and his notion of the “dual authority” of text and performance as a point of departure, this essay shows how these stagings restored the centrality of the performer’s physical presence and histrionic skills. Working with new stage-oriented translations, Dresen and Besson foreground the tensions between thought and action, idealism and material reality, language and gesture as acts of resistance against official ideology and the generational authority of the fathers. By contrast, Zadek and Tabori develop postmodern and psychoanalytic interpretations centred on an eroticised, wounded or diseased actorial body to expose, through theatrical artifices, cross-dressing, improvisation and the disruption of scenic illusion, the brutality of political power and post-war society’s persistent inability to confront its past. The statement “The play’s the thing” thus emerges not as an abstract maxim but as a definition of theatrical materiality, implying the dependence of the spectral Shakespearean text on the actor’s body in order to renew itself in the interplay between actor and spectator.

Margaret Atwood, one of Canada's most celebrated and iconic writers, has shown an interest in exploring issues relevant to contemporary audiences in her fiction since the publication of her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). Atwood's diverse body of literary work addresses important current concerns such as gender inequality, technology, consumerism, and the climate crisis. In her more recent dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last (2015), Atwood imagines the US as a wasteland devastated by economic crisis. Within this fictional landscape, a social experiment emerges as a seemingly ideal social model, while the survivors must navigate new and complex circumstances. The novel contains several instances of parody and satirical commentary on contemporary consumerist practices and the obsession with technology and artificiality. Sex dolls, referred to as prostibots in The Heart Goes Last, play a pivotal role in Atwood's exploration of technological progress and its implications for humanity. Drawing on theories of posthumanism, bioethics, and narratology, this paper aims to analyse Atwood's inherently parodic construction of sex dolls as Gothic embodiments of artificial others. These prostibots not only redefine what it means to be human but also draw attention to the anxieties associated with the emergence of posthuman replicas, which, in turn, raise various biological and ethical issues.

This study examines the application of AI in literary analysis, focusing on Shakespeare's characters Ophelia and Miranda. I explore two approaches: Zero-Shot and Co-Intelligence. The Zero-Shot method, which operates without direct training, provides quick but superficial insights, often lacking depth and nuance. It struggles with recognizing complex rhetorical devices and fails to capture the unique trajectories of the characters. In contrast, the Co-Intelligence approach excels through structured interaction and collaboration between human and AI, effectively highlighting the divergent paths of Ophelia and Miranda. This method uncovers Ophelia's emotional turmoil and descent into madness, as well as Miranda's growth and discovery. The study suggests that while Zero-Shot may suffice for a quick overview, Co-Intelligence offers a richer, more detailed analysis that is well-suited for complex literary studies. This collaborative approach holds promise for integrating AI into humanities research, providing new directions for exploration. The debate continues on AI's role in capturing literary nuances compared to human analysis. While some remain skeptical, the potential for AI to enhance literary interpretation is promising.